![]() ![]() Gary King pathologically hits on every stewardess who steps foot on a Below Deck Sailing Yacht boat, and we’ve got a season-long love triangle on our hands, no script necessary. Lisa Rinna says Yolanda Hadid has Munchausen syndrome (well, she repeats that Yolanda Hadid may have Munchausen syndrome), and that’s enough fodder to propel an entire season of television because the reactions to that bomb, whether it was planted by a producer or not, are very real. That kind of reality TV as we know it- The Real Housewives, The Bachelor, The Hills-typically runs on villains. ![]() But it is what reality TV has long been accused of being: scripted stories crafted by producers and enacted by an all too willing cast. Jury Duty also isn’t reality TV, not exactly. ![]() He’s the hero of a story that’s being written based on the decisions that he makes, each one somehow more kind and generous than the one before. But there’s nothing practical about an entire courtroom of actors staying in character for 16 days straight, and Ronald isn’t the butt of the joke here. Prank shows have existed as far back as the mid-20th century, when Candid Camera ran practical jokes on unexpecting civilians, and they remained a pop culture mainstay in the early aughts when Ashton Kutcher donned a Von Dutch hat to torment Justin Timberlake on Punk’d. It’s weird, and it’s lovely, and sometimes you feel a little weird about thinking that a prank is lovely at all, but thus is the power of a great protagonist. It’s all in the name of tricking a man into thinking he’s participating in the most ludicrous trial of all time and-oops!-making a little found family of freaks, geeks, and Marsdens along the way. He’s a man with a well of empathy, grace, and patience so deep that not even the universally mundane experience of jury duty, as written by former writers on The Office Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, can drain it. Luckily, the series cast Ronald as its axis. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. It’s a genius concept teetering on an ethical tightrope, with precisely one human maintaining the balance. Because of a paparazzi incident involving A-list sweetie James Marsden (playing a fictional bag-of-dicks version of James Marsden), the entire jury is forced to be sequestered for the duration of the two-week trial. The twist, of course, is that there’s one juror who thinks it’s all real: Ronald, a deeply normal man from San Francisco who responded to a Craigslist ad asking for people interested in participating in a “documentary” while serving on a civil jury. There is a courtroom full of people who know that the case is fake, the proceedings are scripted, and the judge is Ike Barinholtz’s dad. In the Amazon Freevee hit, a fake court case is tried by fake lawyers in front of a fake jury made up of 11 actors and one nonactor. The show is Jury Duty, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since it concluded its Season 1 run a few weeks ago, around the same time that clips of its absurdly funny courtroom scenes unexpectedly blew up on TikTok and made a celebrity of its unwitting star, Ronald Gladden, who is now the main character of a series of fan edits all about the fact that he’s simultaneously nice and 6-foot-6. ![]() Rather, it’s a show that’s been meticulously scripted, cast, and produced to emulate reality for one-and only one-of its cast members. Hidden away on a strange subscription streaming service that you don’t actually have to subscribe to is a strange reality TV show that isn’t actually a reality show. ![]()
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